Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians

Drunk Summer Vacay and okay fine let’s do Aethelflaed. Now I know a lot of you stan The Lady and you might want to fight me when this is over but I have Thoughts so I’m risking it. (Also holy shit this is so, so long, fair warning.)

Okay. So for background, which you might know or might not oh well it’s important. So England, in the 9th century, it’s not England as we know it now, it’s a fusion of kingdoms that is a fusion of kingdoms. For our purposes it starts with 7: Wessex, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, Mercia, Kent, and Northumbria. By Alfred the Great’s time this was reduced to four – Wessex (where he was from, and the dominant kingdom), Mercia (where Aethelflaed would be based), East Anglia, and Northumbria (both of which had been taken over by the Vikings, although the far north of Northumbria managed to hold out). Alfred’s task is to fix shit. And part of that, eventually, is marrying his daughter to Aethelred of Mercia.

I know. These names are bullshit. It’s fine, my anger and confusion over the fucking names is what led me to learn Old English because WHAT. Just bear with me.

Okay so Aethelflaed.

*daughter of Alfred the Great

*married Aethelred of Mercia

*So Mercia is like a client kingdom. Think of it kind of as a state? You have the Lord of Mercia – that’s Aethelred – and you have England, which has a king. So Aethelred is governor and Alfred is president. Except Mercia, it used to be the top dog, until it came under the control of Wessex, which went on to control everything else. And the Mercians, they remember.

So when Aethelflaed comes along, highly educated and competent and able to play the game, to strike the right balance between Acceptable Female Behavior and The Motherfucking Boss, they’re into it. They know and respect queenship, it’s Wessex that has a hang-up when it comes to queens, so when they get Aethelflaed they’re like yep, we know this dance, we have no problem, all hail The Lady.

And Lady, understand, is the early English title equivalent to Queen.

*Okay so Aethelflaed does some good governance while her husband is alive, but it’s after he’s dead, and her father is dead, that she really starts to shine. Because as far as we know, the Mercian witan, the council that has a lot of input into who should be the next ruler, they decide to go with Aethelflaed. And so on her own, she’s The Lady of The Mercians.

*As Lady/Queen she does great things. She leads the army against the Vikings. She probably doesn’t fight, that’s a honed skill that she wouldn’t have been trained for, but she knows how to ride, she knows how to lead the men, and she knows how to direct a battle. She builds a bunch of fortified towns along the borders of her kingdom. And she works in tandem with her brother, who takes the throne of England after Alfred but makes zero attempt to take control of Mercia from her. And I guess technically and culturally he should at least try, like I said Wessex is not and will never be down with queens and also Aedward should have a problem with a client kingdom having such a powerful ruler. But she’s just. So good. He can’t justify going in and taking over.

*So Aethelflaed is SO AWESOME that when it looks like she might be able to take back York, the Vikings there, they say you know what? We don’t want to fuck with that. The fucking Vikings. And they swear that they’ll submit to The Lady of the Mercians. And the only kink in the whole plan is that she up and dies. She was almost 50, which is amazing for the time, her father was about the same age and he didn’t have to deal with childbirth.

*Even more interesting, it seems as though her daughter and only child, Aelfwynn, was her designated heir. And the Mercian witan made her Lady. Marking the first female to female succession.

*Aelfwynn wasn’t Lady for long before Aedward came in, deposed her, and subsumed Mercia into his rule. It’s not really clear how long she ruled, the different copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle give different dates for her deposition; it could have been 6 months, could have been a year and a half. Nor do we know for certain WHY. Maybe the Mercians lost faith in her and turned to Aedward. Maybe Aedward decided he’d had enough of the whole queenship business – he had a rather complicated marital and dynastic history himself. Or maybe Aedward realized that Mercia was acting more like an independent kingdom rather than a client, and he decided to stamp that shit out while his niece was new on the job. It’s important to understand that defeating the Viking invaders was paramount, and if taking power from his niece was the way to consolidate shit, then that’s what had to be done.

I think about her, though. Aelfwynn. It’s generally believed that she was hustled into a nunnery, and the overall tone is somewhat negative, or sad. But becoming a nun wasn’t so terrible, and also, it’s not like people forgot who she was or where she came from. The records don’t tell us what the rest of her life was like, but that doesn’t mean it was bad.

*What’s also interesting about the Aelfwynn situation is that you might assume well, Aethelflaed only had the one child, of course she chose her daughter to be heir, and of course the witan backed it. But Aelfwynn was her only *biological* child. See Aedward, he had a son, and he sent that son off to be raised and educated by Aethelflaed. He would become a great man, Aethelstan; the Mercians would choose him as their king after Aedward’s death, he would finish Aethelflaed’s work and take York from the Vikings, and ultimately be the first king of a united England. So there was an alternative available, and everybody still went with the female succession. They respected Aethelflaed’s work, they trusted her judgment, and initially they must have seen something in Aelfwynn that made them believe she was the right choice. That’s pretty cool.

*Okay so my major frustration with the whole Aethelflaed thing is that she is both ordinary and extraordinary. Within the Mercian context, the position she held and the stuff she did isn’t all that unusual; she was a culmination of a culture that had a steady and consistent record of being cool with queens. It’s only because Wessex became the dominant power that their anti-queen bullshit became the dominant culture, and within *that* context she’s unusual.

*The other issue is that we have this very specific concept of what a ‘powerful’ medieval woman looks like, and she often looks like a man. By which I mean that the concept of power in and of itself is highly gendered. Kings have POWER; they make laws, they lead armies, they dispense justice. And when we look for powerful women in the past, we look for POWER (and Aethelflaed had it, in spades). But that often leads us to overlook the myriad other ways that women accessed and wielded power. It causes us to look at someone like Aelfwynn and think oh damn, she was queen, she had POWER in her grasp, and then she lost it and slipped into obscurity. But she just slipped out of the records that viewed POWER as the ultimate end, the only reason someone should be recognized and recorded. And this is problematic because it diminishes some of the ways that women heavily influenced events – you were probably more impressed by Aethelflaed leading armies than with the influence she had over her nephew/foster-son, even though we wouldn’t have had an Aethelstan without Aethelflaed and that paved the way for England as we know it today (the good and the bad). And it also allows some people to continue to make the argument that women, for example, don’t belong in politics, or the boardroom, or whatever, even though they’ve always been there, just not always in the way we might prefer to see them.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Aethelflaed. I think she’s interesting. Her situation just raises all kinds of other issues that I grapple with as a gender historian, and now I’ve tortured you with them too. Sorry.

*One final thing. One of my favorite theories is that Aethelflaed was the inspiration behind the Old English Judith poem, and that it was originally translated for her. The poem, which I’ve talked about before, focuses on Judith’s assassination of the general Holofernes. She hacks off his head and saves her people. There are some differences between the OE poem and the biblical story that indicate it’s an adaptation rather than a straight translation (which nothing ever is anyway), and that the author was inspired by Aethelflaed. (Joanna Arman talks about this in her book about Aethelflaed, if you’re super interested in the details. Pauline Stafford also mentions it, and Pauline Stafford is the shit, so.)

Anyway, I like to think about the author who produced the OE poem, and how into it he must have been. Like fuck yes, I’m gonna honor my queen with this story about a badass chopping heads, love u. And I also think about the shift that happened, at some point in time, that led to the only remaining copy of that same poem being produced and added to the manuscript that contained Beowulf and The Wonders of the East. The shift from queen to monster, inspirational to horrifying, Aethelstan and Aelfwynn’s mother dispensing righteous justice to Grendel’s mother dying in a lake. Because they come to us in one order, Beowulf then Judith, but they were most likely originally created in the other, and why position the vengeful mother as negative unless Mother also equaled power?

You don’t necessarily need to lead an army to cut off the enemy’s head; you just need a basket and your own badass self. That’s how they saw Aethelflaed, once upon a time. And I’m far more intrigued by THAT concept of power.